Most of the music I listen to is 40 years old. Or more. Trying to keep even a little current, I started seeking out recent artists. One day Apple Music served up a song called “Chicago” by British singer/songwriter Josienne Clarke.
Drawn by the title, I gave it a listen.
Now songs about Chicago tend to be very specific. The classic 1922 “Chicago: That Toddling Town,” for instance, not only mentions a particular street — “State Street, that great street” — but Judy Garland’s version names a certain chic restaurant, the Pump Room, and exactly what she’ll be eating there: “On shish kabob, and breast of squab we will feast ... and get fleeced.”
Clarke’s song is specific in its own way.
“It’s not Chicago’s fault,” she sings, in a subdued, precise voice, “that no one came to see me play.”
The moment I heard that line, I knew it had to be based on one very real experience. Nobody makes that up.
So what happened?
“That was the 17th of September, 2016,” said Clarke, when I caught up with her by phone at her home on the western coast of Scotland. “I had just signed to Rough Trade Records. One of the first things I did was go over to the States for a tour. We played New York, Boston, Philadelphia. We went into Canada, then to Bloomington, Indiana. Most of those gigs were fairly well frequented. Then we went to Chicago ...”
To Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont Ave., a beloved Roscoe Village dive bar/jazz venue.
To be honest, the room wasn’t completely empty.
“It’s kind of a lie to say that no one came, because there was actually one guy in the back in a red jumper,” she said, using the British term for a sweater. “I feel bad every time I talk about this song and then play it. His whole experience at that gig, I have erased.”
Then again, feeling bad is something of Clarke’s brand. Or as she put it: “Melancholy is a vocation in itself.”
She sang her full set to the guy in the red sweater. Then she went to the bar, ordered a big whiskey, and thought about what had just occurred. Here she was, a professional singer with a music contract.
“Not a thing I thought would ever happen to me,” she said. “I’m a small person from a little nowhere place, and that felt like, ‘I must have made it.’ Obviously the music industry doesn’t work like that. It’s never going to be easy.” She had “one of those moments when you can either crumble into self-doubt or be angry or throw a big diva stroke. Or you can find a way to rationalize it, make sense of it.”
Such as by turning the fiasco into a song. Which got me listening to other Clarke songs, and let me tell you, she is a woman of parts, with a wide-ranging intelligence and a deep bench vocabulary as she sweeps her spotlight across the dark night of the soul.
“The hardest job of artists in the music industry is balancing a sense of self,” she said. “You are simultaneously the most important person and no one, no matter how successful you are. Trying to find a sense of your own self-worth defined by your work alone is nigh on impossible.”
Clarke, 41, takes an unconventional approach toward her image in a youth-driven profession.
“I’m just going to look older,” she said, while keeping in mind: Satisfaction is something best sought inside.
“The older I get, the more I think the artists who manage to stick out a career is not due to talent, or hard work, or success,” she said. “It’s the ones that manage to find a way of coping with that, of finding a sense of self that you define internally.”
She’s in Scotland because her mother is there, and can help care for Clarke’s 15-month-old son. Clarke is launching her next album in May. No plans to return to Chicago, but she carries the song and its lesson with her.
“If you talk to anyone, even the most successful musicians, everybody has a Chicago story,” she said. “People hear the song and want to tell me, ‘Oh, I did this gig ...’ It’s not a unique story, not an interesting story, in and of itself. What it means is what you do with it.”
